Highways to a War (55 page)

My life is in the box, Volkov had said. Well, here was his life: these few things.

His will was on top: not a formal legal document, just two typed and signed sheets, dated six months earlier, and witnessed in Hong Kong by his boss at CBS. Glancing at the first page, I saw that he’d left everything to Linda Holmstrom. This meant all his savings: an amount of some $50,000. He had few possessions of any value. Not much to show, I thought, for half a lifetime of risk.

“Jesus,” Mike said slowly. “To her! But this lady quit on him: she divorced him. Why would he leave it to her?”

The Count was one of those people who don’t love enough, or else too much, I said.

He shot a questioning glance at me, but made no comment. I turned back to the trunk, and picked up four portrait photographs.

The first, which was framed, was a black-and-white picture of a blond woman in her late thirties. She looked directly at the camera, smiling to put us at our ease; but her well-spaced gray eyes gazed through us into some distance of which we knew nothing, and had no right to know. This, I didn’t doubt, was his “Minnesota Swede”: a Scandinavian-American of essentially prosaic beauty, whose face showed intelligence without imagination. She wouldn’t get intense about things that weren’t supposed to matter, I thought: and certainly it was a face that would have frowned on Dmitri’s excesses.

The other portraits were of people who were pretty clearly Volkov’s family. A rather vulnerable-looking man of middle age with a neatly trimmed blond beard, Dmitri’s mouth, and an expression of melancholy dedication: his father, I decided. A handsome, big-boned woman in a formal, sleeveless gown from the thirties: no doubt his mother when young. And finally, an unframed portrait in sepia of a man in a nineteenth-century suit with a decoration on the lapel, and a cravat. He was clean-shaven, but with long side-whiskers, and his expression was what the nineteenth century would have called “imperious.” This face, with its white-blue eyes, was startlingly like Dmitri‘s, except that the jaw was heavier. On the back was a legend in Cyrillic. I didn’t doubt that this was Count Alexis Volkov, and said so to Mike.

He took the picture and studied it, his silence becoming oppressive. “Aristocrats,” he said at last. “What use are they now? I reckon this grandfather was the start of Dmitri’s problems.”

I went on going through the box.

A number of envelopes containing loose photographs. A jade Chinese statue, old and valuable from the look of it: possibly the Goddess of Fortune. Books, two of them Russian, and dating from the last century: the works of Pushkin, and a short work of Tol stoy’s whose Cyrillic title defeated me; Cossacks featured in the illustrations. Books in French:
The Outsider,
by Albert Camus; the poems of Baudelaire. Dostoevsky’s
The
Possessed, in English. Many more trinkets, of little obvious value to anyone else: the sad favorite objects of a lifetime. And finally, letters: only two sets of letters.

There were two letters from Linda Holmstrom to Dmitri, dated two years before; and there were six from him to Linda, all of many pages, in unsealed envelopes, addressed but unposted. I looked at a few lines of one of them, and would not read any more. She’d have to read them, now.

I closed Volkov’s trunk and found Mike still looking at me, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands loosely clasped between his knees. For the first and only time in all the years I’d known him I saw tears in his eyes, and it disconcerted me. He blinked, but his face remained frozen and without expression. He was looking more physically drained with every moment, it seemed to me, and I guessed that until now, he hadn’t had time to grieve; grief was only just beginning.

He stood up, and walked out onto the little balcony between the shutter doors, blowing his nose as he went. After an interval I followed him, and we stood there in the night’s heavy warmth, looking down on the drive and the lamplit perspectives of Monivong Boulevard beyond, emptied by the curfew. It helped that we were both Australian; I knew how to judge his silence, and for how long to let it stretch.

Finally he said abruptly: “Nothing ever happened between Ly Keang and me.”

I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t think it had, I said. Why was he telling me this?

“I had the idea it might have been bothering Dmitri,” he said.

Well, you know better now, I said. There was only one woman in Dmitri’s mind, and she wouldn’t get out of it.

He glanced at me with an expression that was unusual in him: a sort of defensiveness. “Have you got a cigarette, Harvey?”

I shook my head; he’d forgotten I didn’t smoke.

“Shit,” he said. “Why don’t you take it up?”

He gave me the beginning of a grin, then turned away and leaned his forearms on the balustrade, hands locked, his long, blank face turned towards the darkness, out of which the boom of artillery could be heard at intervals. When he finally spoke, it was in the flat, jerky tones that affect the phlegmatic in the grip of emotion.

“Dmitri was my brother,” he said. “And I reckon it’s my fault he’s dead, Harvey. I talked him into going to Kompong Cham.”

No: come on, I said. Don’t start thinking that way, Snow. Dmitri chose to go, the way he’d done a hundred other times. You didn’t make him go.

But he went on staring at the darkness, and made no answer.

For once, I was glad of his taciturnity.

 

 

His involvement with Ly Keang began very soon after this, as you probably know.

My impression was that for Langford, she became Cambodia.

You’ll probably find that fanciful and sentimental. All right, maybe so. But I have this notion, Ray, that we never love another human being so completely as when that human being is part of something else. Something which we’re in love with, or ready to be in love with, before we ever meet them. Something which becomes a part of our dreaming of that woman; that man. Do you see? A place; a piece of the past; a country; a half-remembered life that isn’t even ours, but for which we foolishly ache. I believe that’s how it was for Langford, with Ly Keang.

And the Stringer was a patriot, just to cement it. A patriot in a way that’s gone out of style in the West: devoted to her country and her cause, and sworn, like some heroine out of melodrama, to avenge her father’s killing by those enemies who were finally poised to seize her land and its people—a people whose suffering wouldn’t end with the war, but instead would begin again, at a far more terrible level, in a frowning territory of waste ruled by the black-clad Others.

Jim Feng’s right, in a way: it was as though Mike had never been in love before. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d only just grown into love, on the edge of middle age. It happens. Anyway, for the next two years, until the city fell, they were seldom separated. She moved in with him in that apartment near the Old Market: a very serious thing for a young Cambodian woman of her class to do. Now she would never marry a Cambodian; now her future was with Mike.

He said very little about her to any of us—except that they’d marry when the time was right. We knew better than to try and discuss her with him. His voice and his expression forbade it: she was a creature apart.

TAPE 44, MAY 10TH, 1973

—She came at about seven-thirty this evening, in the middle of a thunderstorm. The monsoon’s set in early: the rain’s been coming down hard since yesterday, when Jim and I got back into Phnom Penh.

—I was sitting inside the apartment on the rattan settee: sweating in the sticky heat, no shirt on, smoking and drinking brandy and doing nothing: thinking of Volkov. My head still strange, the way it’s been since he died—which was only yesterday.

—Little things about Dmitri kept running through my head. The way he squinted when he shot film; the way he’d talk about music when we were drinking, describing it and waving his hands. I kept hearing his voice saying
“Mon
Dieu” and “as a matter of fact”—slurring the words. I wanted it to stop, but it wouldn‘t, no matter how much brandy I drank. He smiled at me in my head.

—The rain got harder, as though it was trying to drown out everything that had happened: drown out what I’d done. The afternoon rains go on, and the bombing goes on. Everything coming down. For the first time, the Khmer Rouge haven’t pulled back with the wet season: they’re still trying to take the city, fighting on in the rain, the mud. So the B-52s go on bombing, quite close: you can hear the explosions through the roar of the rain, and the thunder. Nothing but red mud and ruined villages, out in the countryside: everything being destroyed. Cambodia being destroyed.

—Tonight was like the first time Keang came. Except for the rain.

—Sary was sitting like a little brown statue on the Chinese sideboard, watching me. No lights on in the room. Through the open doors onto the balcony, over by the railings of the market, the petrol lamps of the Khmer traders were blurred and trembling in the rain. Wind, and more thunder. The top of the coconut palm next to the balcony running with water, fronds gleaming and tossing like landed green fish.

—Then she came. My door open as usual, and she walked into the room behind me, just like before.

—She told me later she spoke to me but I didn’t hear, because of the thunder. A cool finger on my bare shoulder the first I knew of her. I thought Sary had come to me along the back of the settee: a paw. When I turned and saw Keang, I stood up. She began to come around to the front of the settee, looking up at me in the dark without speaking. It was as though she was accusing me of something, except that her expression wasn’t quite right for that: it was more like a question.

—She’s come to make me explain about Dmitri, I thought; she’s going to blame me. My heart was hammering because she’d startled me, and because she was here. Her head was tilted back, her eyes never leaving my face, and she got to the front of me and took both my hands in hers. Neither of us spoke, and I hadn’t planned to touch her, but I found myself holding her. She seemed to slide. Her body light yet definite against me.

—We kissed for a long time. She opened her lips, her saliva for a moment in my mouth, starting an electric tingling that would have built and built, if I hadn’t let her go. Deadly, that tingling: everything being changed for us, far into the future. I could hear a mosquito whining; then it settled on my shoulder and began to drink my blood. I let it, looking at her. The sting was part of what was happening: a brand.

—Jim Feng said you’d be here. You’re alive, she said. But thin, thin, Mike.

—She didn’t smile. Her eyes stayed on mine, as though by staring long enough, she’d draw everything out through my head.

—Yes, I’m alive, I said. But Dmitri isn’t. I’m sorry.

—But she didn’t understand me.

—I’m sorry too, she said. He was your good friend for such a long time. I think you loved him.

—Yes, I said. And I think you did too.

—She turned away, shaking her head. Breath drawn in through her nostrils, clearly audible. Then she said: He was a dear friend, but you know I didn’t love him. I love you: you. And you’re alive.

—She was looking out through the doors at the lights in the rain. I’ll be sorry I’ve said that, she said. But I’ve said it, never mind. When people said you were missing, I thought I would go crazy. I was sure the Khmer Rouge had taken you. My aunt and uncle thought I was sick in the head. I couldn’t go to the paper; couldn’t work; couldn’t eat. And then yesterday the news came that Dmitri was dead and you and Jim were alive. But I couldn’t come to the airport or the Hotel Royal to meet you with all those others. cried for Dmitri alone—then I waited to see you without other people.

—I picked up my shirt from a chair and pulled it on; then I walked over to the sideboard and looked for the bottle of cognac. Sary stood up and arched her back. Keang came over and stood stroking her, looking at me sideways as I poured two drinks. Sary narrowing her eyes and beginning to purr.

—She likes me, Keang said.

—We both do, I said. I gave her the cognac, drank my own straight down, and poured another. My hands were shaking.

—She drank hers just as fast, and held out the glass. As I poured, she looked at me again, that long top lip of hers drawn down firm over the teeth, her expression questioning: her joker’s expression. So you like me, she said. A man who likes everybody and loves no one: that’s you.

-No. I love you, I said.

—So now I’d said it. And I came up close and looked down at her, but not touching her. She stared back, eyes widening. No flirtation in them, no deception: clear black glass at night. There were only inches between us: I could feel her body warmth.

—But tonight I’m thinking about Dmitri, I told her. I can’t stop thinking about him, tonight. I feel very bad about him. And I should feel bad.

—She shook her head, looking at me. No, she said. No, you should not feel bad.

—I took her hand, and led her over to the settee. There was another roll of thunder; Sary jumped down from the sideboard and ran underneath it, and Keang laughed. She sipped her cognac; watched me with her head on one side. Then we both stared out at the rain and the market lamps and the swinging top of the palm tree. Water gurgled in a pipe somewhere. Everything was changed out there, the lights and wild rain belonging somewhere else: somewhere stranger than Phnom Penh, where she and I were going.

—Do you want to talk about what happened? she asked.

—No, I said. Not tonight. But it was all my fault.

—And I told her how I’d made Jim Feng and the Count come with me to Kompong Cham.

—She put her hand on my shoulder, rubbing it gently. That’s what you were sitting here thinking. That’s why you are sad, she said. But you’re wrong, it’s not your fault. Everyone chooses what they do. Dmitri didn’t have to go to Kompong Cham.